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We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France.

˜ The Duke of Wellington

That our cartography is transparently the best in the world is the battle cry of every British map addict. We wave our OS Landrangers in the same spirit that the English longbowmen at Crécy flourished their state-of-the-art weaponry at the French, confident that we are holding the latest, the most accurate, the loveliest maps known to man. And one single fact underpins this whole fabrication, the slender basis for our patriotic fantasy. We must have mapped the world better than anyone, because every measurement, in all its precision, and the whole grid on which every map depends are taken from a base that passes through—and is named after—an otherwise unremarkable suburb of London. Greenwich Mean Time, and the Greenwich Meridian, the world’s cartographic backbone, is ours.

And we don’t have to put our country’s name on our stamps. Same principle. We were first, therefore we were the best and got special privileges.

Take that République Française, with your overly wordy timbrespostes and your redundant meridian, left abandoned and overgrown like a Norfolk branch line closed in the 1960s. And take that USA, for that matter. You may have superseded us in just about every possible aspect of superpower status, but we’ve still got the maps, the clocks and the meridian. It’s a small victory, granted, but it’ll have to do.

To a junior map addict, who gazes at a British map with the fondness of Rod Stewart at a brand new blonde, the certainty that our maps are so good is buried deep within and breaks out in pustules of xenophobic acne. In the 1970s, watching the TV news, I was genuinely and repeatedly surprised to see how developed the rest of the world seemed to be when it flashed past on a nightly basis. Surely, these places couldn’t be as sophisticated as the Land of Hope, Glory and the Ordnance Survey? When, at the age of six, I first visited my mother after she’d moved to France, I couldn’t quite believe that Paris had traffic lights, zebra crossings, decent shops, well-dressed people—people even fully dressed at all. It was Not England; therefore it was supposed to be dusty and primitive. It looked—whisper it quietly—just like home. Only—whisper it even more quietly—rather better.

Ah, la belle France. Our nearest neighbour, archest rival, flirtiest paramour, oldest, bestest friend and bitterest foe, all rolled into one. We and the French are like an ancient, brackish couple locked into what looks from the outside like the stalest of wedlock, but which, behind firmly locked doors, is as doe-eyed as a Charles Aznavour chorus. We sneer at them, but around eleven million of us make our way over the Channel every year to wallow in their wine, cheese and meats of dubious provenance. They sneer at us, but can’t get enough of our culture, either high, in the ample shape of royalty and aristocracy, or low, from punk to getting pissed properly. We look down on them for their pomposity, their flagrantly over-inflated sense of their own importance, their rudeness, their insularity, their ponderous bureaucracy, their clinging to a long-vanished past, their dodgy new best friends, their fiercely centripetal politics, their all-round unwarranted, swaggering arrogance. They look down on us for precisely the same reasons.

It is this intense neighbourly rivalry between Britain and France that has driven most of the advances in mapping over the past four hundred years—or, more specifically, it is the ever-watchful competitiveness between their two capital cities, London and Paris. These citystates in all but name have been peering haughtily at each other across that slender ribbon of water for the past two thousand years. Both are convinced that they are the epitome of all that is civilised and progressive in this world, and both have so much in common—not least their terribly high opinion of themselves.

It’s a rivalry that endures, even constantly reinvents itself, like a family feud that passes down the generations long, long after the original protagonists are cold in the sod. Some of the finest mapping of its age was the by-product, such as the forensically detailed eighteenth-century invasion plans that each side drew up of the other’s nearest coastline during that hundred years or more of semi-permanent war that existed between the two nations until the 1815 full stop—or rather, semicolon—of the Battle of Waterloo. As the nineteenth century progressed, the arena for mutual Anglo-French antagonism was widened, each side having already flexed its muscles in competing for territories in north America. Now, no part of the globe was immune from the colonisers, with each side racing to capture—and, for the first time, map—lands in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. The tectonic plates of power were shifting in Europe too, and lavish maps, often with home territories boldly exaggerated or shown as definite possessions when they were little more than statements of ambition, were produced by British and French cartographers in each nation’s struggle to be perceived as the continent’s top dog. France and Britain took the idea of the map as one of the boldest, and most swiftly absorbed, tools of political indoctrination and launched it into the modern era.

Even in today’s much reduced times, the snippiness between London and Paris continues to fuel outbreaks of hubristic condescension on both sides, wind-assisted by maps. Londoners will glower over the maps, drawn up by London County Council, of sobering Second World War bomb-damage, showing the city utterly blitzed and razed in hard-won victory, and could be forgiven for comparing them with their Parisian equivalents, depicting only the lightest of grazes to the city’s elegant face, thanks to its people’s early capitulation to the losing side. Parisians in the 1980s and ’90s loved to brandish their metro map in the faces of any passing Brits, showing as it did the splendid new RER (Réseau Express Régional) lines that scorched across the city like high-velocity darts, while muttering darkly about their last visit to London and memories of chaos on the Northern and Central Lines. And how fitting was it that, once the extravagant French plans and maps had been compared with the more down-to-earth British ones, London squeaked its victory to host the 2012 Olympics over Paris, the long-time front runner and bookies’ favourite?

When it comes to comparing the current standard of our respective national maps, it’s a shockingly one-sided contest, and I’m really trying to be impartial. The French equivalent of the Ordnance Survey is the Institut Géographique National (IGN), and its maps are awful. Leaden, lumpy, flimsy and downright ugly, they are often hard to find, and not worth the bother of trying. The 1:25 000 series, the equivalent of the OS Explorer maps, is an assault on the eyes, with its harsh colours, grim typefaces and lousy printing; they look plain cheap and you’d be hard pressed to work out a decent walk from any of them. The 1:50 000 orange series, the equivalent of our OS Landrangers, with the same problems of garish colours and typographic overcrowding, somehow manages to be even worse. France is larger than Britain, granted, about two and a half times the size, but they’ve carved up the country so ineptly that you’d have to buy 1,146 of these dreadful maps, at a cost of nearly €10,000, to cover the whole country—nearly six times the number of OS Landrangers (204, costing less than £1,500), which would get you the whole of Britain at exactly the same scale and in far greater style. IGN maps at 1:100 000 are not quite as bad, but really, at any scale, you’d be better off in France with the Michelin series, for they are always far more elegant than the government jobs. But still nowhere near as good as You-Know-Who.

At least there’s one area of life where you can always rely on the French, and that’s managing to squeeze a bit of soft porn into the most unlikely topic, even cartography. Back in those innocent pre-internet days, when you had to rely on a late BBC2 or Channel 4 film for a glimpse of flesh, I remember catching one night an early 1970s movie by the name of La Vallée. In English, it was called Obscured by Clouds, after the intriguing caption written over a huge blank space on the map of Papua New Guinea. This, they stated in the film, was an unknown mountainous region, the last place on Earth that had yet to be mapped. A gorgeous young French consul’s wife, Viviane, is in the country to find exotic feathers for export to Paris; she joins an expedition into the unmapped mountains, which soon turns into a phantasmagoria of mind-expanding substances, writhing bodies and an accompanying soundtrack by Pink Floyd. Even at the age of seventeen, I found the idea of the map a far bigger turn-on than a few soft-focus French hippies in the buff.

When it comes to mapping Paris, the ‘us versus them’ contest is a little more equal. Despite endless redesigns, they’ve never managed a metro map with quite the same panache and clarity of the equivalent one of the London Underground. Even when they tried to mimic Harry Beck’s design directly, the result was the proverbial dîner du chien and it was quickly scrapped. With the street maps of the city, however, the French have long since hit on a winner. While the London A-Z and its myriad of near equivalents do the job with postman-whistling efficiency, the little red book that can be found in the handbag of any Parisian (except perhaps for the ones that house small dogs) combine utility with élan. Considering how much the French love to make of their superior sense of style, it’s just as well they’ve got at least one map to prove it.

The little red book—by Cartes Taride, Éditions André Leconte and others—fits Paris perfectly: it’s lightly stylish, full of fascinating detail, slightly bewildering and extremely easy just to lose yourself in. Its art deco titling on the cover, like the classic Métropolitain signs, and its format have been pretty constant since the end of the nineteenth century. The main mapping—colourful, cheerful and crowded—is done arrondissement by arrondissement, with the spill over of the suburbs to follow. There are fine fold-out maps of the metro and the RER, but the fun is only just beginning. Every street in the index—which has those handy A-Z dividers you find in address books—is given its nearest metro station, every bus route is represented by a scaled-down version of the classy linear map that you find on board the bus, with every stop clearly marked, and there are map references, addresses, phone numbers and nearest metro stations given for every police and fire station, government office, embassy, hospital, monument, museum, cinema, theatre, cabaret, railway terminus, place of worship and even cemetery. All contained within something measuring just three and half by five and a half inches.

I may well be biased, for the Paris street atlas is something I’ve known intimately and loved unconditionally for over thirty-five years, ever since my mum moved there. Although it was no fun being the first in class to have his parents divorce, there were definite benefits, regular trips to Paris being a pretty obvious one, especially when the other parent is in a Midlands town that can only be called a capital within the very tight confines of carpet manufacturing. The first time my sister and I went over there to visit Mum, I was terrified; convinced that the law in France demanded that everyone speak French all the time, and that I wouldn’t be able to say a word to her, nor understand anything she said to me. Mum would let me go off to get breakfast from the local boulangerie, sending me out with a ten-franc note and the phrase une baguette et trois croissants, s’il vous plaît drilled into my brain. On the second visit, I’d walk a little further to another boulangerie, then a little further still, until, by the time I was about nine, I’d hotfoot it into the nearest metro station (Porte de Champerret, ligne 3), ride a train or two and collect some bread from whichever random part of the city I surfaced in. Fortunately, my mum and my sister weren’t averse to having breakfast at about eleven o’clock.

My hunter-gathering for bread was beyond excitement: armed with my little red book, I felt such an integral part of this sophisticated city, a tiny corpuscle pelting through the arteries of this statuesque grande dame. It was an intoxicating buzz, one which encapsulated so many of the things that I’ve most come to value: freedom, travel, spontaneity, humanity. For I never felt in any danger—quite the opposite, people couldn’t have done more to help. I was reminded of those happy days when, in April 2008, ‘America’s Worst Mom’ (as she was dubbed by Fox News and the shock-jocks), a newspaper columnist, wrote about letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway on his own. America divided down the middle, many cheering her for taking on the media-fuelled paranoia of modern parenthood. They didn’t generate quite as much noise, however, as the half of the country who screamed cyber-abuse at her from within their fortress compounds, while their inert, incarcerated children fantasised about the day they’d go beserk in a shopping mall with a handgun. What about the murderers, they ranted, the muggers, the paedophiles, the gropers, the platform-shovers, the terrorists lurking round every corner? Are you out of your mind, lady? But have they been to New York lately? You’re more at risk walking through Ashby-de-la-Zouch on a Saturday night.

So many years of getting to know Paris made me support her instinctively in the eternal duel with London. Our capital seemed angry and chaotic by contrast, a sensation that only deepened when I lived there for four years at the end of the 1980s, initially at university and then trying to commute every day right across the city for my first job. London during that period was a mess: the glistening towers of Docklands rising fast out of the debris around them, a glassy two fingers to the squalor and poverty, the doorway-sleepers and the disenfranchised. It suited me well, though. Being angry and chaotic myself, London couldn’t have matched me more perfectly. From the lofty heights of my college in leafy Hampstead, I joined every campaign, protest and march, finding myself applauding Tony Benn most weekends at some rally or other in Trafalgar Square. What do we want? Er, student grants, no poll tax, freedom for Nicaragua, Nelson Mandela, Thatcher’s head on a pole…what was it this time? When do we want it? NOW! Two days before the dawn of the 1990s, I left London, smug and thankful that I was quitting this seething metropolis for a return to the safety of the Midlands. Paris was still on its elegant little pedestal in my mind, and I ranted at anyone who’d listen about its vast superiority, and that of France as a whole, over our mean-spirited little Tory island and its yuppie capital. Gradually, though, I fell in love with London all over again, seduced by its energy, its caprice, its sheer balls. One up, one down: the lustre of Paris was peeling, its Mitterand era chutzpah shrivelled into a matronly conservatism.

So many of the advances in cartography, as well as practically every other discipline, have stemmed from the ancient grudge and eternal competitiveness between these two great cities; it is a theme that reappears as the steadiest leitmotif through any analysis of modern maps and mapping. The victory in securing the world’s prime meridian for Greenwich was perhaps our literal high noon in the battle, which came at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC. Delegates from twenty-five nations gathered from the first of October, charged with finally settling the question that was dogging the world’s governments, and its transport and export industries.

Up until then, anyone anywhere could, and did, work to their own meridian. While the Equator is a fixed line of latitude—determined by its position at the centre of an oblate (i.e. polar-flattened) spheroid, its particular climate and the fact that its days and nights are of equal length the whole year round—the defining line of longitude, namely a full circle around the globe that connects the two poles vertically, can be placed anywhere. Establishing longitude was essential for navigation, especially at sea, but also for working out relative time zones. When the sun is overhead at noon in one place, 15° (i.e. 1/2₄ of 360°) west or east it is an hour different. Time was delineated in what might be called the way of the sundial, so that it was noon in any particular place when the sun was highest in the sky. Even in a country as tiny as Britain, this meant that there were numerous different local times in operation. With the advent of the railways, this had to change on a national basis, and soon, thanks to the massive upsurge in oceangoing trade, the need to standardise time zones between countries became acute, especially as there was a plethora of meridian lines being used by different countries.

The 1884 Washington conference came exactly a year after the 7th General Conference of the European Arc Measurement, held in Rome. It was at this geodetic gathering that the French had secured international agreement to use their metre as the global standard unit for measuring length. Their definition of a metre—one ten-millionth of the section of their meridian as it passed over the land between Dunkirk and Barcelona—had been achieved by impeccably scientific means that demonstrated to all the advanced nature of their geodetic powers. Using the line that passed through the Paris Observatory to calculate the metre also subtly cemented that meridian in the world’s consciousness, at a time when calls were becoming ever louder to create one super-meridian, from which all else would be calculated. To decide where that should be was the raison d’être of the Washington conference, twelve short months later. The French must have arrived in America feeling that the prevailing wind was well and truly in their sails.

Not for long, though. There had evidently been some anglophonic stitch-up going on behind the scenes between the host Americans and their British cousins. Use of the Paris Meridian to establish the world’s measuring stick was employed not in advocacy of its adoption as the Prime Meridian, but as a sly argument by the English-speakers against such an eventuality. After all, they cried, it’s someone else’s turn! You got the metre, now be a jolly chap and leave go the damned meridian, won’t you? Of course, the irony should not escape us that this Anglo-American pincer movement, so much of which depended on their reminding delegates of the recent French victory in measuring the world, came from two countries who have had as little to do as possible with the metric system ever since. Even today, the USA remains one of only four countries on Earth officially using imperial weights and measures (it’s an unlikely foursome: the others being Burma/Myanmar, Yemen and Brunei), and with its ever-growing ranks of metric martyrs, save-the-pint campaigners and kilometre refuseniks, it can hardly be said either that Britain has embraced the New (well, 1883) World Order.

At Washington, the French swiftly realised that no one else was going to support the Paris Observatory as the proposed site of the Prime Meridian, so they set about plan B, namely the standard fallback position that, if they weren’t to have the prize, they must do all they could to scupper the chances of the British. We would doubtless have done exactly the same in their tiny shoes. It wasn’t just the French performing beautifully to their own national stereotype: the conference minutes are a quite hilarious catalogue of every nationality living up to its most dastardly clichés. The Americans, swaggering into their role as world-leaders-in-waiting, were bullish, yet smarmy, and masters of manipulation, particularly of the easily flattered British. To that end, the Americans played the good guy, genial hosts with absolutely no self-interest in the process, while shooting across everyone’s bows at the very first session with a clear reminder of their latent muscle. The chairman of the US delegation, Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers, was elected President of the Conference. In his opening address, he declared:

Broad as is the area of the United States, covering a hundred degrees of longitude, extending from 66° 52’ west from Greenwich to 166° 13’ at our extreme limit in Alaska, not including the Aleutian Islands; traversed, as it is, by railway and telegraph lines, and dotted with observatories; long as is its sea coast, of more than twelve thousand miles; vast as must be its foreign and domestic commerce, its delegation to this Congress has no desire to urge that a prime meridian shall be found within its confines.

The minutes do not record if he expounded this while stroking a white cat in his lap.

Rodgers’ statement made clear where the host delegation were to place their support when it came to deciding the location of the Prime Meridian: Greenwich. Indeed, it was only on the second day of the conference that American delegate Naval Commander W. T. Sampson jumped the gun and formally proposed it, stating:

As a matter of economy as well as convenience, that meridian should be selected which is now in most general use. This additional consideration of economy would limit our choice to the meridian of Greenwich, for it may fairly be stated upon the authority of the distinguished Delegate from Canada that more than 70 per cent of all the shipping of the world uses this meridian for purposes of navigation.

The French delegation were horrified, and filibustered the proposal off the table, with a speech by their prime delegate, M. Janssen, the Director of the Paris Observatory, that culminated in his demanding more time to consider the question but which, to reach that point, took well over an hour as he pondered the enormity of the matter in hand. He voiced their opposition to Greenwich in the most tremulously righteous terms:

This meridian, instead of being chosen with reference to the configuration of the continents, is borrowed from an observatory; that is to say, it is placed on the globe in a hap-hazard manner, and is very inconveniently situated for the function that it is to perform…Instead of profiting by the lessons of the past, national rivalries are introduced in a question that should rally the goodwill of all…Since the report considers us of so little weight in the scales, allow me, gentlemen, to recall briefly the past and the present of our hydrography, and for that purpose I can do no better than to quote from a work that has been communicated to me, and which emanates from one of our most learned hydrographers. ‘France,’ he says, ‘created more than two centuries ago the most ancient nautical ephemerides [tables showing coordinates of celestial bodies at particular times] in existence. She was the first to conceive and execute the great geodetic operations which had for their object the construction of civil and military maps and the measurement of arcs of the meridian in Europe, America and Africa. All these operations were and are based on the Paris meridian’. If another initial meridian had to be adopted, it would be necessary to change the graduation of our 2,600 hydrographic plates; it would be necessary to do the same thing for our nautical instructions, which exceed 600 in number.

Although happy to have a good sulk about how much more inconvenient a change of meridian would be for the French than anyone else, Janssen knew well that there was little mileage in further banging the drum for the Paris Meridian, whose cause was already lost. He seized instead on a more nebulous point that, he hoped, would sink the cause of the British, demanding of the conference that ‘the initial meridian should have a character of absolute neutrality…and in particular especially should cut no great continent—neither Europe nor America’. While Britain pretended to be above such squalid argument, their attack-dogs, the American delegation, weighed in with ready answers: ‘The adoption of the meridian of Greenwich has not been sought after by Great Britain,’ Commander Sampson boomed back. ‘It was not her proposition, but that she consented to it after it had been proposed by other portions of the civilised world.’ How very gracious of us: we can only imagine the holier-than-thou expressions adopted by the British delegation at this point. In his opening address, the American Admiral Rodgers had presaged this question of neutrality:

Should any of us now hesitate in the adoption of a particular meridian, or should any nation covet the honor of having the selected meridian within its own borders, it is to be remembered that when the prime meridian is once adopted by all it loses its specific name and nationality, and becomes simply the Prime Meridian.

Absolute horse-shit of course, but high-minded horse-shit of the finest grade. The Americans were really getting the hang of this diplomacy lark.

M. Janssen was the undoubted star of the event, able to turn in grandiloquent speeches, on any topic, that lasted an hour or two. Realising that the neutrality argument was all that lay in the way of the adoption of Greenwich, he worried at it like a starving poodle:

An immense majority of the navies of the world navigate with English charts; that is true, and it is a practical compliment to the great maritime activity of that nation. When this freely admitted supremacy shall be transformed into an official and compulsory supremacy, it will suffer the vicissitudes of all human power, and that institution [the meridian], which by its nature is of a purely scientific nature, and to which we would assure a long and certain future, will become the object of burning competition and jealousy among nations.

Anyone particular in mind, Monsieur?

Professor J. C. Adams, of the British delegation, waspishly replied that Janssen’s ‘eloquent address, in so far as I could follow that discourse, seemed to me to turn almost entirely upon sentimental considerations’, and reiterated the point of practicality, that the most ‘convenient’, i.e. widely used, meridian would make the most sense. He didn’t sully his purity by naming it; he didn’t need to.

In turn, Janssen rebuffed Adams in the politest way possible, while managing a few withering digs at his British counterparts (‘and we are still awaiting the honour of seeing the metrical system for common use in England’). He protested—rather too much—that the French objection was nothing whatsoever to do with ‘national pride’ and questioned the idea of the ‘convenience’ of the Greenwich Meridian. To whom exactly, he postulated, was it convenient? Ah, the Brits and the Yanks: the ‘advantage is to yourselves, and those you represent, of having nothing to change, either in your maps, customs or traditions—such a solution, I say, can have no future before it, and we refuse to take part in it’. He persevered in even darker tones: ‘You see, gentlemen, how dangerous it is to awaken national susceptibilities on a subject of a purely scientific nature.’ Ratcheting up his rhetorical powers, he concluded one particularly long speech with a flourish: ‘Whatever we may do, the common prime meridian will always be a crown to which there will be a hundred pretenders. Let us place the crown on the brow of science, and all will bow before it.’

Janssen’s sterling verbosity was only delaying the inevitable, so, realising that they were backed into a corner, the French hit their nuclear button, issuing veiled threats that they might walk out of the conference and then, when that went almost unnoticed, strident complaints about the standard of translation into their language at the conference. They demanded a recess in order to find a better French stenographer, a process that kept the conference from reconvening for a full further week. When all the delegates reassembled on Monday 13 October, everyone’s positions, after seven days of backstage back-stabbing, had coagulated into immutability.

The French kicked off proceedings by playing what was their only remaining decent card, the demand for the ‘absolute neutrality’ of any chosen meridian. It was put to the vote and heavily defeated by 21 to 3. As a faintly placatory gesture, Sandford Fleming, one of the British delegation, invoked the idea of placing the Prime Meridian 180° from Greenwich, thus, he said, giving it some political neutrality and positioning it largely in the uninhabited Pacific Ocean. The idea didn’t mollify the French at all, who sneered that even if the Prime Meridian was 180° from Greenwich, it was still the Greenwich Meridian in all but name, only in reverse.

This proposal from the British delegation was typical of our fauxhumble demeanour at this stage in the proceedings: it’s easy to be magnanimous when you’re clearly winning, especially in a contest that you’re feigning absolute disinterest in. The British vat of oil to pour on troubled waters was soon generously employed again, as the French and Spanish reminded delegates that their governments fully expected Britain and the USA to join the metric system, if not in a quid pro quo for the adoption of Greenwich, then certainly in the same spirit of global good manners and scientific unity. One of the British delegation, General Strachey, smoothly replied:

I am authorised to state that Great Britain, after considering the opinions which were expressed at Rome, has desired that it may be allowed to join the Convention du mètre…[and] that there is a strong feeling on the part of the scientific men of England that, sooner or later, she will be likely to join in the use of that system, which, no doubt, is an extremely good one.

In other words, we’ll get home and do precisely nothing about it for a century, but thank you so much for your concern. Stuff you with a smile, Monsieur.

The definitive vote on adopting Greenwich loomed, and the French made one last desperate bid to prevent it. The loquacious M. Janssen deferred to his colleague M. Lefaivre to make their final plea. ‘The meridian of Greenwich is not a scientific one,’ piped Lefaivre, ‘and its adoption implies no progress for astronomy, geodesy or navigation.’ It was only ‘convenient’, not scientific, a fact that

our colleague from Great Britain just now reminded us of by enumerating with complacency the tonnage of British and American shipping…Science appears here only as the humble vassal of the powers of the day to consecrate and crown their success. But, gentlemen, nothing is so transitory and fugitive as power and riches. All the great empires of the world, all financial, industrial and commercial prosperities of the world have given us a proof of it, each in turn.

This was the sound of grand nobility in defeat, for the vote was then taken and Greenwich confirmed as the world’s Prime Meridian by 22 votes to 1, with two abstentions. Only San Domingo (the island of Hispaniola) voted against, with Brazil and France abstaining. They didn’t want to look like sore losers. Or rather, they were saving that for later.

After further lengthy arguments about how to calibrate degrees from Greenwich, and how to calculate time zones, the French asked for another deferment of the conference. They returned six days later with a small bombshell of a proposition: that the metric system—which, they reminded delegates, everyone had spoken so voluminously in favour of—should be extended from the measurement of length, volume and weight and into the realms of degrees, angles and time. Greenwich might be getting the line through it, but at least the grid of longitude and the calibration of the day that spun off it might be expressed in a French way, or at least in a way that was guaranteed to piss off the Anglo-American alliance. The British and the Americans cried foul, that such a decision was beyond the remit of the conference.

Style over substance: the Paris meridian

For the first time in weeks, the French smelled English-speaking blood and pressed home their slender advantage, demanding a vote on whether or not a vote could be taken on the topic. It was close. Thirteen countries agreed that the issue of metricising time and angles could be considered; nine, Britain and the US included, voted against. Two abstained. So, as eager not to appear bad losers as had the French been on the Greenwich vote, the Americans and British then ostentatiously supported the metric system in the subsequent vote. In fact, no one voted against it—not that that made the faintest bit of difference in actually making it happen.

Flushed with their pyrrhic victory, the French demanded a further adjournment to the conference, which briefly reconvened two days later before its final adjournment, for nine days, in order that the conference protocols could be drawn up, in English and, of course, in French. On the first of November, a month to the day since the delegates had first gathered, the conference closed in a mutual orgy of back-slapping and vainglorious speeches about how the international community was united as never before and that they had made history. Thankfully, the sagging balloon of hot air was peremptorily pricked by the very last contribution noted in the conference minutes: the ever vocal M. Janssen of the French delegation complaining about the standard of French used in their translations.

As expected, the French reaction to the conference’s decision was to ignore it for as long as they possibly could. The Paris Meridian was still marked as 0° on French maps until 1911, and even beyond that, they kept refusing to refer to the notion of Greenwich Mean Time, preferring instead to name the concept the altogether snappier ‘Paris Mean Time diminished by 9 minutes 21 seconds’. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on: PMT has such an appropriate ring to it for matters of timekeeping. Even though the Paris Meridian has long been shunted into the sidings, the French still keep polishing it and showing it off to the world like a priceless relic. One of their main millennium projects was to plant lines of trees the entire length of France along their old meridian line. It might no longer be functioning, but hey, you could see it from space, or at least if you look closely enough on Google Earth in a few decades’ time. To a chippy Brit (and, when it comes to any dealings with the French, that’s most of us), the project smacked of dismissive looking down the Gallic nose at the lack of presentational flair that attends our meridian line.

The world’s timekeeping and cartographic staff it may be, but as the Prime Meridian enters Britain in the retirement town of Peacehaven on the Sussex coast, it’s marked only by a dowdy obelisk and the Meridian Centre, a deathly 1970s shopping mall with the unmistakable aroma of incontinence. Two hundred and three miles due north, it leaves English soil in similarly dreary fashion, on a beach just south of the Sand-le-Mere caravan park, near Tunstall on the Holderness coast of Yorkshire’s East Riding. Britain’s bleakest coast is also

Substance over style: where the Prime Meridian enters England at Tunstall, East Yorkshire

the fastest-receding in Europe, where houses and roads tumble regularly over the edge, leaving their forlorn traces to be washed over by a freezing sea the colour of a river in high flood. In the circumstances, the great local millennium project—placing a huge carved boulder on the cliff top to mark the point at which the global meridian arrives in its home country from the North Pole—was something of a triumph of optimism over experience. Instead of lasting the full thousand years, it managed just three, disappearing over the muddy cliff in a storm in January 2003. In between these two inauspicious gateposts, as well as the whistles and bells of Greenwich itself, the meridian is marked by a number of plaques, columns, archways and, in Cambridgeshire, a line of daffodils planted by Boy Scouts. It’s either disarmingly modest or just a bit crap. Either way, it’s British through and through.

If—and, frankly, it’s a bloody big if—we accept British pre-eminence in modern mapping owing to the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian as the gold standard for measuring lines on a map, then one event gave birth to this certainty. That was the creation of an earlier imaginary line on the landscape, the first precisely calibrated base line across a stretch of English countryside, from which all initial triangulations were taken to produce what soon became the Ordnance Survey. It took place in the summer of 1784, and for reasons that are also gloriously British: once again, a fierce spirit of one-upmanship against the French and a supremely thin-skinned paranoia that they were insulting us.

We had a lot of making up to do; by the late eighteenth century, French map-making was leagues ahead of that of its clod-hopping British cousin. Nearly a century earlier, their experiments in establishing accurate lines of longitude and latitude had proved that the world was an oblate spheroid, rather than a perfect sphere, which had tremendous impact on the precise measurement of relative distances, radically altering the shape and size of France itself as presented on a map. Coupled with advances in triangulation and surveying, the Académie Royale produced, in 1789, by far the finest and most ambitious cartography that had ever been made of one country: a complete set of 180 maps, covering all of France, at a scale of 1:86 400, just under one and a half miles to the inch. Even the detail on the maps was starkly different: while we were still delineating our upland areas with crude shading or lumpy molehills scattered over the landscape, the French were developing sophisticated systems of hachures—groups of parallel lines to indicate height—before pioneering the use of contour lines on some maps from the 1750s.

The year 1789 is better remembered in France for rather bloodier reasons than the publication of the national map, the Carte de Cassini as it became known, after César-François Cassini de Thury, the Director of the Paris Observatory and its principal progenitor, who had died of smallpox in 1784, leaving his son to continue the work. The new revolutionary government looked with grave suspicion on anything royale, the Académie included, although they were more than delighted with the maps and promptly took over all responsibility for their production and publication. The Académie Royale was closed down (to resurface a few years later as the more egalitarian Académie des Sciences), Cassini junior was imprisoned, while Académie director Antoine Lavoisier was carted off to the guillotine. It was at just this moment in history that the British were starting to get their act together, and, aided by the chaos in France, were soon able to outstrip their neighbours. Though, as ever, it took some pompous prodding by the French to sharpen us up.

That came six years before the Revolution, in the shape of a missive from Cassini de Thury to King George III, in which he loftily pointed out that the world’s two principal meridians, those of Paris and London, were out of kilter in both longitude and latitude. His inference was that, thanks to the superior surveying and triangulation of the French, the mistake was almost certainly on our side of the Channel, and would His Majesty care do something about it? He further rubbed salt into the wounds by pointing out that he himself had checked the trigonometry on the French side all the way up to the Channel coast, and, using a telescope, had established many landmarks on the English side that could be useful if we could be bothered to do a proper survey. The King’s principal Secretary of State, Charles James Fox, passed on the letter to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society in London. Many of its members were outraged by the slurs it contained, the Astronomer Royal, the Reverend Doctor Nevil Maskelyne, firing off a hasty rebuttal of the French claims. But there was one Fellow of the Royal Society who received the news with equanimity, bordering on glee, for he knew that this was the chance for which he had been waiting for decades.

We know frustratingly little about Major-General William Roy (1726-90), a map addict of impeccable credentials and the father of the Ordnance Survey. No portrait survives of him, few biographical details have come our way, but, from his plans, letters and publications, we can see a man utterly driven by maps and an insatiable urge to make them ever better. He started in his native Scotland, working with the surveying crews that had been drafted in as a response to the Jacobite uprisings in the Highlands of the 1740s. The official response was the same as always: go deep into enemy turf, build roads and military outposts, move the population to where they could better be tracked, and, most importantly of all, comprehensively map it. For years, this was Roy’s day job, though, as a sideline, he also worked obsessively to map the Roman remains of Scotland, for they had employed much the same techniques in suppressing the clans fifteen centuries earlier. There’s not much doubting what his specialist subject would have been on Georgian Mastermind.

The first survey of Scotland, between 1747 and 1752, was of the troublesome Highlands, when Roy was teamed up with the young Paul Sandby (1731-1809). Sandby, who later became one of the age’s most celebrated landscape painters and a founder member of the Royal Academy, provided the artistic talent for the beautiful maps that they produced, complementing Roy, the technical wizard who worried perpetually about getting the topographical detail correct. Once the Highlands had been comprehensively mapped, it was decided to survey and plot southern Scotland, but Sandby had returned to England by then and the resultant maps were nowhere near as spectacular as the earlier ones of the far north. Roy was a perfectionist, and the lack of precise measuring equipment frustrated him enormously; late in life, he wrote about these early map-making efforts in Scotland, describing them as ‘rather a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map of a country’.

From Scotland, Roy enlisted in the army and served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War with France. Once again, his map-making skills, and perfectionism, were usefully employed in his work as a special adviser on troop deployment and strategy. Roy’s reports on such matters included beautifully drawn maps that he always insisted on doing himself, the army draughtsmen and his subordinate officers just not being up to his exacting standards. This lack of trust in anyone else became a growing theme as his career moved towards its apogee.

On his return, he settled in London, and continued rising through the ranks of the army, while spending more and more time on his cartographic pursuits. Central to his ambition was finding the right equipment, or rather, having the right equipment created for his needs. Much of his time was spent experimenting with measuring instruments in order to see how they could be employed to produce the greatest possible accuracy. They were never quite good enough. Nonetheless, his military experiences abroad, and his knowledge of how far advanced the Dutch and French were in such matters, had convinced him that the time was ripe for a comprehensive national survey, and he first approached the authorities about the matter in 1763. With a canny knack for telling the government what he most thought they would respond to, he emphasised Britain’s vulnerability to invasion, particularly along the south coast, and the importance of conducting such a survey ‘during times of peace and tranquillity’, rather than waiting to do it under the chaotic cloud of war. They turned him down on grounds of expense. He re-presented his plans three years later, only to have them refused once again.

Impatient but undeterred, William Roy used every moment of his spare time to conduct his own informal triangulation experiments around London, establishing the position and distance of landmarks in the capital in relation to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Triangulation remained the bedrock of map-making until it was supplanted, less than thirty years ago, by satellite Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology. The principle of triangulation is that if you know the length of one line of a triangle, and two of its angles to the other lines, the entire triangle can accurately be plotted for both distance and elevation. It’s an extremely time-consuming business, depending as it does on caddying heavy equipment up to the highest vantage points: the first triangulation of Britain and Ireland, started by William Roy in 1783, took nearly seventy years to complete.

Roy regularly presented his London triangulation findings to the Royal Society, so that when the inflammatory missive came from Paris in 1783, he seemed the obvious man to restore Britain’s dented honour by conducting the experiment. He was extremely well prepared, for he had used every one of his travels, both at home and abroad, to map the landscape and establish the most suitable places for triangulation. The flat expanse of Hounslow Heath, to the west of London, had long been selected as his preferred choice for the perfect base line. And although the project was nominally to establish only the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories, Roy knew well that it could, and should, be the harbinger of something far greater; that it could ‘extend different serieses [sic] of Triangles…in all directions to the remotest part of the Island’.

William Roy is an undoubted hero to any British map addict, but he is also something of a siren warning to us all. The brilliant young adventurer turned inexorably into a grumpy old man, for whom no one, and nothing, was ever quite good enough. Sounds familiar? I rather fear so. So fixated did he become by his great triangulation project that he picked fights with anyone who failed to come up to his exacting standards, most spectacularly in the case of instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800). Ramsden was just as much of a perfectionist as Roy, and with just as great a cause: his scientific and astronomical instruments attracted customers from across the world to his Piccadilly workshop. Roy’s greatest frustration throughout his map-making career was the fact that the measuring instruments available couldn’t cope with the precision that he demanded. For the great triangulation project of south-east England, Roy commissioned Ramsden to design and build the most exact theodolite ever seen.

Unfortunately, Ramsden failed to employ enough workmen on the project and thus to produce the goods soon enough for Roy, and the cartographer began to cast increasingly bellicose aspersions on the instrument-maker’s professional ability. The massive theodolite—it weighed over fourteen stone and had to be hauled around on a specially designed truck—was the finest ever created, but, to Roy’s continuing chagrin, it was still prone to some tiny errors and, most annoyingly, took a whole three years to build. In fairness to Roy, he was sixty years old and in failing health, so must have felt the continued delays with increasing impatience, urgently wanting to finish the project while he still could. That doesn’t excuse his behaviour, however, as he repeatedly complained about Ramsden to the Royal Society in letters and papers that became ever more dyspeptic. Ramsden, also a Fellow of the Society, responded in kind, so that members found themselves piggies-in-the-middle as complaints and counter-complaints between the two men resounded throughout the Society’s hallowed halls. Roy charged Ramsden with being ‘remiss and dilatory’ and ‘very negligent’; Ramsden whined back that ‘nothing could equal my surprise on hearing the charges brought against me by Major-General Roy…I was the more affected by it as coming from a Gentleman with whom I considered myself in Friendship’. This spat reached its climax in May 1790, when Ramsden demanded that the Royal Society expunge some of Roy’s more colourful slaggings of him from their records. Sadly, William Roy died a few weeks later, the matter still unresolved. It was an acrimonious—and, to us, salutary—end to a brilliant career.

Although William Roy died before the official foundation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791, he was its undoubted progenitor. The event that gave formal birth to the organisation was the re-measuring of the Hounslow Heath base line that Roy himself had first established some seven years earlier. In April 1784, following the French submission to George III, Roy had swiftly secured government backing for the survey and wasted no time in getting on with it. He had at his command twelve Army NCOs and an entire division of the 12th Foot Brigade from nearby Windsor; these he set to levelling and clearing the five-mile-plus route of his line. Having a burly crew of soldiers around was also good insurance; Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century was the most dangerous location in Britain, and certainly not a place for gentlemen to linger. London and Bath were the two wealthiest cities in Georgian England, and the busy road connecting them ran (as it does still) along the heath’s northern edge. The lowlying ground, with its unexpected fogs, suppurating ditches and numerous copses, was the ideal hiding place for highwaymen and cutpurses, who had rich pickings among the well-to-do on their way to Windsor or the West Country. Contemporary maps show a string of gibbets along the Bath Road across the heath. Many of these would have contained rotting corpses swinging in the breeze, for the policy of the authorities was to return the bodies of those hanged at Tyburn to the place of their misdemeanours, to be displayed to all as a shocking deterrent.

Jesse Ramsden—still, at this point, in Roy’s good books—had made a steel chain exactly one hundred feet in length, together with wooden rods of twenty feet apiece: both were used alternately to calibrate the distance as the party progressed slowly from King’s Arbour Field and across the heath, with the distant witch’s hat spire of Banstead church as their guidance point on the horizon. Work progressed through a monumentally wet summer, conditions that didn’t suit the wooden rods, which were found to expand and contract way too much for accurate measurement. The project ground to a brief halt. Glass rods were commissioned and produced, which required the utmost delicacy as they were hauled across the heath, particularly when it came to crossing the busy Staines Road.

Delays occurred too because the surveying team became something of an unlikely attraction, especially after King George III dropped by on 19 July to see how the work was going: unfortunately, so torrential was the rain that Roy was unable to demonstrate much of their work. The King returned on 21 August and spent two hours examining the team’s work and discussing it with them. This, according to Roy, ‘met with his gracious approbation’. In his wake, all manner of society notables trotted by to see what was going on, and it was left to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, to erect mobile refreshment and hospitality tents in order to cope with the crowds and to keep them at a discreet distance from the work of the surveyors. The team finally reached their destination, the workhouse at Hampton, on the penultimate day of August. By now, the steel chain had been abandoned and the entire measurement had been made using the glass rods. The base line, announced William Roy, was 27,404.72 feet: just over 5.19 miles long. ‘There never has been,’ he declaimed, ‘so great a proportion of the surface of the Earth measured with so much care and accuracy.’

Three years later, when Ramsden’s theodolite was finally ready, the survey continued, using triangulation to work its way from Hampton down to Dover and the English Channel. The supposed aim of establishing the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories was never quite attained, but the process had, in Roy’s eyes, been hugely successful in his main ambition of showing how poor and imprecise current British maps were and how a national survey was both urgently desirable and eminently practicable. In his final report to the Royal Society and the King in 1789, Roy egged them all on:

The trigonometrical operation, so successfully begun, should certainly be continued, and gradually extended over the whole Island. Compared with the greateness of the object, the annual expence to the publick would be a mere trifle not worthy of being mentioned. The honour of the Nation is concerned in having at least as good a map of This as there is of any Other country.

Such as France, Your Majesty, he might have added. It took less than a year for the authorities to agree and to find the money, but, by then, Roy was dead.

The fogs, footpads and gibbets may be long gone from Hounslow Heath, but the land still has a melancholy tang to it, if only thanks to the fact that so much of it has been eaten alive by Heathrow Airport, located there for precisely the same reasons (vast expanse, flat as a pancake, near London) as Roy’s base line. The airport has swallowed whole villages along the northern part of the line, its route south-east has been filled in with shops, factories, houses, roads and all the normal suburban detritus of the outskirts of London. The line, dotted across field and factory, and marked portentously as General Roy’s Base, used to appear on OS maps up until the early twentieth century, though not since. Strangely, the northern end of it at Heathrow is labelled, on the current OS 1:25 000 Explorer map, with the supremely wordy ‘Cannon: West End of General Roy’s Base (site of)’; although the cannon is firmly there in precisely the spot indicated, there is nothing ‘site of’ about it. The other end, at Hampton—which is far easier, and more pleasurable, to find—doesn’t even warrant that, and goes completely unmarked.

Trying to trace the line today, I was reminded of the late Linda Smith’s immortal observation that Greater London was something of a misnomer, for ‘the further you get away from the middle of it, London doesn’t really get greater—it’s more Lesser London’. She came from Erith (‘not so much the city that never sleeps, more the town that lies awake all night staring at the ceiling’), which sits crusted on the rim of the capital in much the same way as Feltham, Bedfont and Hanworth, the sprawls that now cover William Roy’s historic line. There are other invisible lines to contend with here: these undistinguished, indistinguishable towns are firmly on the other side of the tracks from leafy Hampton (as in Court), where Roy’s measurement ended. This lies in that weird little south-western corner of Greater London, the Twickenham-Richmond triangle: smug and tweaked, embarrassed Tory so voting LibDem, death by bungalow and leylandii.

After Major-General Roy conducted his experiments, wooden posts were interred in the ground at either end of the recorded base line as a memorial. In 1791, eleven months after Roy’s death, the party led by the Duke of Richmond, charged with re-measuring the line for the Board of Ordnance, found that the posts were rotting and so they were replaced by upended cannons. There, wondrously, they still remain. Both cannons have seen untold change unfold around them over two centuries. The southern one, at Hampton, witnessed the demolition of the borough workhouse nearby; it thence lived in an area of open ground known as Cannon Field until Twickenham Borough Council built housing estates on it in the late 1940s. At least they left the cannon intact and had the good grace to name the two nearest culde-sacs Roy Grove (where the cannon can be found sat in a grassy gap between two post-war semis) and Cannon Close (which, indeed, it is). This is Hampton as the acme of suburbia, so much so that the street opposite is Acacia Road.

Handily, there’s a bus—the 285 Kingston-on-Thames to Heathrow—that almost precisely connects the two cannons, taking a route that’s only a little over a mile longer than William Roy’s 5.19-mile straight line. The good general wouldn’t recognise it these days. The bus coughs its way up the Uxbridge Road and into Feltham, doing a quick detour into the Sainsbury’s car park, and passing forlorn-looking light industrial estates, the Clipper Cutz hair salon, the Chirpy Chaps barbers, Cindy’s Nail Bar, Fryday’s chippy, a Subway or two, the A3 roundabout and parades of Metroland semis displaying either a St George’s flag or a ‘No To Heathrow Expansion’ sticker, sometimes both (albeit quite hard to see through the triple glazing).

I broke my journey at Feltham, in order to take a look at another oblique memorial to William Roy, an eponymous modern pub off the High Street. This, it claims, is named after him because of its position more or less halfway along his historic line, although it’s stretching things slightly, as the General Roy pub is nearly a mile to the south of the route. There’s nothing there to indicate its homage to Roy, save for one old map of the district on the wall, showing the Feltham area as a bucolic cluster of villages, before they were entirely obliterated by the spreading gut of the capital and its main airport. The pub is pitched at workers from the nearby industrial park, home to something glassy and chromey called the Feltham Corporate Centre—a name to strike even greater terror into the loins than the town’s rather better-known Young Offenders’ Institution.

From Feltham, the 285 fairly closely follows the route of the base line north-west towards Hatton Cross and Heathrow. Even without the growing taste of diesel in the air and the ear-splitting screams of the jets overhead, you’d know that there’s a major airport coming up. It dominates everything, especially when the tired, tatty—and increasingly impossible to sell—houses finally give way to the dispiriting landscape of international aviation: the pavement-less roads clogged with traffic, the giant hangars, mysterious metal buildings housing anything from security firms to haulage companies, car parks galore, miles of razor wire, CCTV whirring and winking in every direction and a collection of hotels that no one, surely, has ever spent a second night in.

Heathrow Airport only came into existence thanks to government sleight-of-hand at the end of the Second World War. The site, on the richest agricultural land in the country, was commandeered under Emergency Powers in 1943, purportedly for the RAF. It was never used as such. The then Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, revealed in his autobiography that the requisition and construction work undertaken were entirely bogus, and that the plans had always been to turn the airfield into London’s principal civil airport come the end of hostilities. Playing the national emergency card simply allowed the authorities to circumvent any normal planning procedures—and so the pattern continues.

Even Major-General William Roy fell foul of the airport zealots’ economy with the truth. When the never-to-be-used RAF base was being built in 1944, the memorial cannon that marked the north-western end of his base line was removed, in a theatrical attempt to demonstrate that no impediment—even one just five feet tall—should be placed in the way of our magnificent men in their flying machines. Sense eventually prevailed, and the cannon was returned in 1968, and finally replaced in its original position four years later, where it still squats. It’s not easy to locate: indeed, the irony is that you need a bloody good map to find it. Tucked away in a grassy corner nibbled out of a long-stay car park, the cannon sits alone and unloved, overlooking the airport’s main police station and the northern perimeter fence. You’d hardly notice it, especially compared with the huge banner that hangs off the car park fence above it: ‘Exclusive Parking: Park Today. Complimentary 15 Minute Spa Treatment’—well, who wouldn’t want a rub down from a car park attendant? In Paris, you suspect that a monument this significant would have been turned into a vast pyramid, visited by coachloads of schoolchildren by day and extravagantly flood-lit by night.

I paused, gulped down a little more airborne diesel, and felt strangely proud of the British way.